The Crowd, oil on canvas 78" x 60",
exhibited at the Second London Group exhibition 1915 as Revolution,also
known as Democratic Composition. Acquired from the artist by Captain Guy Baker and
presented by his widow Mrs. Stross to the Tate Gallery London.

CLICK FOR MY SNAPS, TATE AUGUST 2014

Wyndham Lewis

1882 born on the yacht Wanda off Amherst Nova
Scotia.Attended various prep schools in
England and America

"Mr.
Lewis' Crowd might pass as a fantastic setting to a Chinese play
in raw yellow, red, white and mustard colour, with Chinese characters
in fretwork suspended in confusing abundance."
Observer 14.2.1915.

"First
and foremost there is Mr. Wyndham Lewis' huge decoration The Crowd
(85) a wondrous pattern of imaginative parquetry, formed apparently
of brick forms of dull red which combine very happily in juxtapaosition
to the old gold bands that form the principal lines of the composition." Sunday Times 21.3.15.

" The
Crowd by Mr.Wyndham Lewis appeared to be a ground plan of innumerable
series of cells without doors. It was drawn with geometrical accuracy
and neatly coloures, and might have passed for a plan executed
by some erratic architect's draughtsman." Connoisseur
May 1915.

LEWIS WRITING ABOUT THE CROWD

"Men drift in thrilling
masses past the Admiralty, cold night tide. Their throng creeps round
corners, breaks faintly here and there up against a railing barring
from possible sights... The police with distant icy contempt herd
London. They shift it in lumps, passim, touching and shaping it with
heavy delicate professional fingers... In ponderous masses they prowl
with excited hearts. Are the crowds then female ?" BLAST 2 1915."The night came on.
He allowed himself to be carried by the crowd. He offered himself
to its emotion which saturated him at length... The human cables had
been disposed no doubt by skillful brains....[ as an experiment] he
would not only mix with the crowd, he would train himself to act its
mood, so that he could persuade its emotion to enter him properly...
In isolation he would examine himself in the Crowd-mood.... He went
outside into the crowd again. He sank like a diver.... Suddenly he
experienced a distinct and he believed authentic shock. It could only
come from the crowd ! Evidently it had come from its mind - the cerebration
of this jelly-fish ! Hence the sting ! He had received his first novel
senation. What was it exactly - could he define it ? Well, it seemed
to be that he was a married man !.....The English crowd is a stupid
dragon. It out not to be allowed out alone ! I have lain in it for
hours together and have received no sensation worth noting As Crowd
it is a washout...." Added, "You have read what Cantleman felt. That
is pretty near to what I felt. Great interest, great curiosity. But
no identification of my personality with the general sensation....
what was meant by Crowd Master was that I was master of myself. Not
of anybody else - that I have never wanted to be. I was master in
the crowd, not master of the crowd. I moved freely and with satisfaction
up and down its bloodstream in strict, even arrogant isolation from
its demonic impulses." Blasting and Bombardiering, 1937. "Hobson
he considered was a crowd. You could not say he was an individual,
he was in fact a set. He sat there a cultivated audience, with the
aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd
- of those who know they are not alone. Tarr was shy and the reverse
by turns ; he was alone." Tarr 1928 version." Death is however
only a form of Crowd.....The Crowd is an immense anaesthetic towards
Death..."
Blasting and Bombardiering, 1937

"It
is often impossible in reading plays to explain their success.
Managers of theatres when accepting pieces are themselves
as a rule generally uncertain of their success, because to
judge the matter it would be necessary to transform themselves
into a crowd."

That
a successful Manager of a Theatre is a Crowd in himself.
Here the manager shown may well be intended by Lewis to be
Shakespeare himself, "holding a mirror up
to Nature".

Wyndham Lewis, Case Study Two

back to BLAST

from BLAST no.1

click to enlarge

The Writings of Gustave Lebon,

The Crowd, a study of the Popular Mind, 1896.

"it has been the task of the masses before to bring
about the destruction of a worn-out civilisation... its final dissolution
is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known justifiably
enough as barbarians. Crowds destroy and do not create. In consequence
of the destructive nature of their power, crowds act like the microbes
which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. In the collective
mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals , and in consequence
their individuality, are weakened." The characteristics of the crowd,
"The first is that the individual forming part of the crowd acquires
solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power
which allows him to yield to instincts which had he been alone he
would perforce have kept under retraint. In any crowd every sentiment
and act is contagious to such a degree that an individual readily
sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. The most
careful observations seem to prove that an individual immersed for
some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself - either
as a consequence of of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd
or from some other cause of which we are ignorant - in a special state
which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised
individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity
of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject,
the latter becomes the slave of all the activities of the spinal cord,
which the hypnotiser directs at will. [the detailed characteristics
of the crowd are ] impulsiveness, irritiabiltiy, incapacity to reason,
the absence of judgement and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration
of the sentiments and others besodes - which are almost always observed
in beings belonging to inferior forms in evolution - in women, savages
and children for instance. "

"An orator in intimate communication with the crowd
can evoke images by which it will be seduced....As soon as a certain
number of living beings are gathered together whether they be animals
or men they place themselves instictively under the authority of a
chief.... The leaders we speak of are usually men of action rather
than of words. They are not gifted with keen forsight... They are
especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous exciteable
half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. [two classes of
leader, the energetic whose will is intermittent, and the rarer group
whose will is enduring] the world belongs to the crowd leader who
possesses a persistent will-force."

"Their tumultous bursts of
violence are like the tumultuous waves which the tempest raises on
the surface of the ocean..."

"It is often impossible on reading plays to explain
their success. Managers of theatres when accepting plays are themselves
often unsure of success, because to judge the matter it would be necessary
to transform themselves into a crowd."

The Writings of Gustave Lebon, The Psychology of Socialism 1899

"The revolutionary ideal was to shatter the classes and corporations and reduce every individual to a common type...Nothing could be more strongly opposed to the Anglo-Saxon individualism which forms the banding together of individuals, obtains everything by it and confines the action of the state within narrow limits."

"It is only in our days and above all since the revolution that Individualism, at least under certain forms has at all developed among the Latin races. .. It is a far cry from the Individualism practiced by the Anglo-Saxons for example, among other nations... Young and vigorous races such as the Anglo-Saxons in which the mental inequalities between individuals are not so great, accommodate themselves very well to such a state of things."

"The Parisian workman approaches the Savage in his impulsive nature, his lack of foresight, his want of self control. and his habit of having no guide but the instinct of the moment."

That most of French Socialists are among the middle classes... a tearful and sentimental Socialism. "Public opinion no longer knows anything but extreme sentiment or profound indifference. It is terribly feminine, and like a woman, has no control over its reflect movements."

That we must see in the crowd more than "the insatiable wild beast thirsting for blood and rapine. When we sound the subject a little we find on the contrary that the worst excesses of crowds have often arisen from extremely generous and disinterested ideas, and that the Crowd is as often victim as well as murderer."

"History can only be clearly understood if we bear in mind that that the morale and the conduct of the isolated manare very different to those of the same man when he has become part of a collectivity."

The Crowd as Sea "Their bursts of violence are like the tumultuous waves that the tempest rains on the surface of the ocean, but without troubling the serenity of its profounder waters... The Socialists imagine that they will easily carry the masses with them. They are wrong. They will very quickly discover that they will find among the masses, not their allies but their most implacable enemies. The crowd may doubtless in its anger

" Socialism is in fact nothing but the religion of the Stomach."

"There is nothing more feminine than the Gallic crowd."

Team Spirit "For a long time it has been remarked that in the football matches against English teams the French are always losers because the English player, preoccupied not with his personal success but with that of his team, passes the ball when he is unable to stick to it, while the French player holds it obstinately, preferring that his side should lose, rather than he should see the ball gained by a comrade."